We Should Have Seen It Coming: The Unraveling of American Democracy (Part II)

In part one, I discussed Jesus and the Powers by N.T. Wright and Michael Bird, which gives us a much-needed perspective on our fragmented and dysfunctional democracies and well as the Church’s response to the autocracies of our day. Wright and Bird correctly argue that Christians have a biblical call to confront the evil forces of this world that seek to usurp God’s authority and prevent human flourishing.[1] 

Unfortunately, there is not much theological collaboration around political issues and how the global church ought to engage with various the various forms of “empire” that have been “let loose” in the world. In an interview with Christianity Today, Wright acknowledges that even among those few evangelical scholars who have written books about political theology, “we’ve hardly begun to think through all these things and how we structure our politics wisely.”[2]  Of course, it is not possible here to give a full biblical theology of power and empire building.

However, what I want to do in part two is examine one episode in the unfolding storyline of Genesis which is highly instructive for our purposes—the story of the tower of Babel. First, I will argue that the story of the tower of Babel provides a theological critique of “empire building” in its various forms. Secondly, I will discuss how one social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, uses this biblical narrative to illustrate how technological hubris as manifested in the modern tower of social media has resulted in a “confusion of languages” that threatens our democracy.

The Tower of Babel: Power and Totalistic Empire Building

One of the more intriguing and captivating stories in the early chapters of the Bible is the episode in Genesis 11 of the building and subsequent desertion of the tower of Babel. The story of Babel—and its near namesake, Babylon—is a constant theme in Scripture, right up to the final chapters of the book of Revelation. Babel represents the apex of human arrogance. As a totalitarian regime, it is motivated by a single purpose: making its own name great. (Sound familiar?) All the energy is mobilized for the construction of monuments to their own glory. Even God’s name is utilized for its benefit. What Babel wants is (presumably) what God wants. The tower of Babel represents a political, religious ideology that declares that this empire is the meeting place of heaven and earth.

Constructing the Tower of Babel

The events of Babel are presented in two acts: the people’s provocation and God’s response.[3] The curtain lifts for act one:

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise, we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” (Gen 11:1-4)

Various interpretations have been given to this passage.  According to John Walton, “the expression describing a building ‘with its head in the heavens’ refers to a temple with a ziggurat.” The ancients designed these ziggurats to be stairways or ramps from the heavens for their gods to descend to earth and meet with humanity. Thus, the tower is a “bridge or portal between heaven and earth” that was “designed to make it convenient for the god to come down to his temple, receive worship, and bless his people.”  In this interpretation, the sin of the tower builders was their effort to manipulate God by bringing him down to their level to do their bidding.[4] 

However, other scholars see the tower as a beachhead for an assault on God’s throne room—it represents an effort on the part of the tower builders to rival God’s greatness and usurp a godlike role. According to Henri Blocher, the spectacle of Genesis 11 is a sequel to Genesis 3:

By its calculated naivety and its play on words, the narrative of Genesis 11 bears an amazing resemblance to Genesis 3. It is basically the same project that mankind seeks to fulfill in the two chapters: to make himself equal with God and thereby gain autonomy. He wants to ascend to heaven, instead of filling the earth. He wants to make a name for himself instead of receiving his name from his Maker.[5]

In both interpretations, the tower at the center of the city is a symbol of human autonomy, pride, and hubris. Christopher Watkin rightly states that it is “a proud assertion of autonomous technological capacity on the part of a culture that has turned its back on God. .”[6] In other words: “The architects and tradespeople of Genesis 11 . . . are seeking not just to coexist but to make a statement, to erect a signature building that will broadcast their renown far and wide. Their reputation will be mediated through their technology; people will know who they are when they see what they have built. They will be the people with the highest tower in the world, and the tower will be a spectacular symbol of their power.”[7]

Augustine’s City of God and the Tower of Babel

Watkin and other commentators point out that Augustine picks up on this theme of the spectacular in The City of God and applies it to the Roman society in which he lived. Various public performances—athletic competitions, executions in the arena and amphitheaters, gladiatorial contests, military reenactments, etc.—are all placed under the category of “spectacle.” In our day, the spectacle takes the form of monuments like the Trump Tower and military parades, complete with marching soldiers, tanks, and fighter jets. What all these forms of spectacle have in common—and Babel is no exception—is that they are “performances that inscribed the logic of imperial power. These spectacles demonstrate the might, authority, and greatness (in short: the ‘name’) of the regime.”[8] 

God is not against technology or political accomplishments. But he is against those who would presume to take his place as the “master of things.” So, he disperses people over the entire earth and creates a confusion of language:

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of man had built. And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so they may not understand one another’s speech.”  So, the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore, its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth. (Gen 11: 5-9)

Ironically, the very place where humans build a tower to “make a name for themselves” is given the name “Confusion” (Hebrew: babel). The word babel is the root of the Hebrew for “Babylon,” which is a repeated symbol in the Bible for any human society which is characterized by a lust for wealth and power that results, not in the common good, but the domination of some, the powerful, over others.[9] This confusion of language is thus portrayed as both a divine response to humanity’s unified rebellion in sin and the result of human arrogance and presumptuous ambition.[10]

In The City of God Saint Augustine contrasts the heavenly city (or City of God) and the earthly city—with the heavenly city represented by Jerusalem and the earthly city represented by Babylon. For Augustine, the primary difference between these two cities is not geographical location or even “higher” spiritual and “lower” earthly realities. Rather it is their two loves. The greatest love in the heavenly city is the love of God, and by implication the love of neighbor. The earthly city, on the other hand, is characterized by love of self. Both cities influence and shape their citizens to love and desire in certain ways.[11]  To paraphrase Augustine, politics—or the ordering of public life—is people bound together by common loves.[12]

In Augustine’s tale of two cities, the builders of the tower of Babel turn away from the “common good” of love of God and love of neighbor and embrace the “private” self-centered “good” of narcissistic self-love. They seek to define their own reality and pridefully pursue human achievement over divine truth. Augustine interprets Babel as a symbol of confusion and the inability of humanity to achieve unity and peace without divine guidance. 

It is important to bear in mind, however, that in the biblical narrative of creation, fall, and redemption the two cities are intermingled and in conversation with each other until the very end when they are separated at the final judgment. Watkin points out that

there is a sense in which each of us lives in one and only one of these cities and a sense in which Christians live in both, depending on how the city language is used. If by the ‘City of God’ we mean something like the biblical language of being ‘in Christ’ and we equate being a member of the earthly city with being ‘in Adam,’ then any individual inhabits one and only one of the two cities at any one time. If we use city language differently, however, to describe the way our loves are ordered on a day-to-day basis, then Christians cannot help but live in both cities at once. To combine both senses, we could say that Christians are legal citizens of the kingdom of God but frequently behave like they belong to the earthly city.[13] (Emphases mine)

Life After Babel: The Social Media and Democracy

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt highlights the significance of the tower of Babel in a much-discussed article in the Atlantic written in 2022.^[14] As a social psychologist (and atheist) his objective is not to describe this ancient story theologically in terms of humanity’s quest for autonomy apart from God. Nor does he treat this as a literal historical event. Rather, he interprets the narrative metaphorically and symbolically. Nonethless, for Haidt, it conveys important truths about the human condition—particularly the current state of American society.

Babel as a Metaphor for Social Disorientation and Confusion

In the biblical story, God is offended by the hubris of a humanity in building a walled city with a tower to reach heaven. Haidt concedes that the text does not say that God destroyed the tower. But in many people’s renderings of the story this is what God does. So, he writes, “let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.”^[15] The story of Babel, he continues, is “the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.” (My emphasis)^[16] 

Haidt observes that it’s been clear for some time that “red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history.” But he suggests that Babel is not a story about tribalism per se. Rather, “it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.” ^[17] It is this sudden and crippling loss of the ability to understand one another and work together, Haidt argues, that makes Babel such a good metaphor for our time.

To further clarify, “Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people.” What on earth happened in the 2010s? And what does it portend for American life in the future?

The Rise and Fall of the Modern Tower

In a summary of the forthcoming book Life After Babel (to be published in 2025) Haidt explains that over the past several thousand years, humanity (re)built the tower as empires, trade routes, and technological progress created increasing mutual understanding, comprehension, prosperity, and cooperation. “With the rise of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the tower grew to an astonishing height, giving every person with a modem an omniscience approaching that of a god. Automatic translators even freed us from God’s curse of multiple languages.”^[18]

Before 2009, in what Haidt calls the “pre-Babel” era, social media was not particularly polarizing or consensus destroying. Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: 1) social capital, or extensive social networks with high levels of trust; 2) strong democratic institutions; and 3) shared stories. Initially, “social media enabled people to share ideas with strangers and organized collective action as never before.” There was a broad consensus that social media would be good for democracy. Mark Zuckerberg regarded social media’s “power to share” as a catalyst that would transform “our core institutions and industries.”

It turns out that Zuckerberg may have been prophetic, but not in the way that most expected. As in so many stories of human progress and hubris (e.g., Promethius, Frankenstein), “we went too far, too fast, and too carelessly,” says Haidt. “Connecting everyone to everyone has had unanticipated systemic effects. It’s not just the quantity of connections that matters, it’s the nature of the connectivity.”^[19] In 2009, the major platforms introduced three major innovations that transformed social media and substantially weakened all three of the fundamental building blocks of a cohesive democratic society. Facebook introduced the “Like” and “Share” buttons and Twitter introduced the “Retweet” button. Both platforms created algorithms that maximized individual engagement and exposed (and exploited) people’s emotions and anger. By 2012, “social media had developed into an algorithmicized ‘outrage machine’ which “gave everyone the power to shame or attack everyone else instantly.”^[20]

According to Haidt, the proverbial fall of the American tower of Babel occurred in 2015 with the intersection of the “great awoking” on the left and the emergence of right-wing populism which converted the Republican party into sycophantic dysfunction under Donald Trump. We cannot blame the fall on Trump; he merely exploited it, argues Haidt. After Babel, “nothing really means anything anymore—at least, not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.” On both sides, performative emotion, outrage, cruelty, and stupidity is the order of the day; stage performance crushes competence; and social media overwhelms newspapers and the nightly news, fracturing and fragmenting the truth. In the post-Babel era, we have become increasingly cut off from objective reality, from reliable means of finding objective reality, and from each other. “We have,” argues Haidt, “a weakened younger generation, an epistemic crisis, a mental health crisis, a moralism crisis, and an institutional crisis. It feels like we are living in a hurricane within a hall of mirrors, and it might be this way for the rest of our lives. We can never go back to the pre-Babel era, so how can we adapt to our new world?”^[21]

Haidt notes that the Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They understood that a democracy is subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” In “Federalist No. 10” James Madison discusses the human proclivity toward “faction,” by which he means our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with “mutual animosity” that they are “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”[22] In the same essay, he describes democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. People are so prone to factionalism, he observes, that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”[23]  

Although we have always had tribal factions, modern technological developments have encouraged triviality, mob mentalities, and the possibility of social and cultural outrage in ways never seen before. The social media, argues Haidt, has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. It has sown such distrust and discord that “every political decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side.”[24] 

According to Haidt, there are three ways in which “the warped ‘accountability’ of social media” has brought political disfunction. ^[25] First, “the dart guns of social media give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens.” Secondly, the social media gives more power and voice to the political extremes at the expense of the moderate majority. Finally, like the wild west, the social media deputizes vigilantes who cause real harm—like innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed into suicide—without any accountability. When our public square is governed by mob dynamics “we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.”[26]

Structural Stupidity

Since the fall of the tower of Babel, we have become more stupid as a society, argues Haidt. The main obstacle to good thinking is confirmation bias—the basic human tendency to search only for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs.  Even before the rise of the social media, people were scouring the internet to find evidence for absurd “flat earth” beliefs and conspiracy theories that the landing on the moon was a hoax or that the U.S. government staged the 9/11 attacks. (In fact, about 10 percent of Americans believe the earth is flat and that NASA faked the moon landings!) But the social media has made things much worse. The best antidote to confirmation bias is interaction and dialogue with people who provide evidence that contradicts our beliefs. But the social media allows people to remain in information bubbles that shield them from alternative viewpoints.

Structural stupidity has infected all aspects of our society, although it tends to take different forms on the left and right. On the left, social media has instilled within both professors and students in our colleges and universities a chronic fear of reprisal for expressing dissenting opinions. On the right, the stupefying process involves a greater tendency toward authoritarianism and a narrative in which America is “eternally under threat from enemies outside and subversives within,” including hordes of immigrants intent on destroying our country.

The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many conspiracies spread by the social media. Approximately one in ten Americans believe the QAnon conspiracy theory that COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips. Apparently, millions of Americans also agree with the claim popularized by QAnon that Hollywood stars like Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey maintain their youthful vitality by ingesting something called adrenochrome, which is made from the blood of tortured children. QAnon is responsible for “pizza-gate,” the theory that Hillary Clinton and other Democrats run a child sex trafficking operation from the basement of a pizza restaurant. Engagement with such conspiracy theories is significantly higher among two groups—millennials and supporters of Donald Trump.[27]

The point here is not just to debunk dangerous conspiracy theories or disparage those who hold them. Rather, it is to indicate that we have a widespread and growing problem in our society involving an inability to separate fact from fiction.[28] In his influential book Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Reich makes the compelling argument that a shared agreement on how to reach a consensus on what can be known as true and durable is critical to the health of any nation. He further argues that this critical function of knowledge acquisition is now under threat.[29] In part three, I discuss the cultural and historical roots of our present crisis.

[1] Ibid., 40-73.  See also Offult, Et al., Advocating for Justice.

[2] McDade, “N.T. Wright: What Jesus Would Say to the ‘Empire’ Today.”

[3] Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, 207.

[4] Ibid., 208. See also Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament 

[5] Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, 209.

[6] Ibid., 208.

[7] Ibid., 213.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 210-11.

[10] Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God, 216.

[11] Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, 219.

[12] Schreiner, Political Gospel, 5.

[13] Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, 219-20.

[14] Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Haidt, “Life After Babel.”

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Haidt, “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Hamilton, “Conspiracy Vs. Science: A Survey of U.S. Public Beliefs.” See also Collins, The Road to Wisdom, 51.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid., 79